With offers of admissions rolling out through the month of April we hope that there are many excited students who have been admitted to UBC! Application decisions will continue in May, especially once UBC receives official grade information from the Ministry next week. This point of the admission cycle does lead to many questions from students regarding their next steps, which can bring both a wave of excitement and anxiety.
What will happen if you’re offered admission to your 2nd choice before you’ve been offered admission to your 1st choice?
We’ve had a number of questions around application choices and what will happen if you’ve been offered admission to your second choice before you’ve been offered admission to your first choice.
Think of the first and second choices on your UBC application as two separate applications because you are applying to two different faculties/programs at UBC. For example, if you have applied to UBC with a first choice of Science and a second choice of Arts, we will be using different criteria to evaluate your application to the Faculty of Science than we will for your application to the Faculty of Arts. These faculties have different pre-requisite courses so admissions averages will be calculated differently and then combined with your personal profile.
Sometimes, we complete an evaluation to your second choice program faster than we complete an evaluation to your first choice. We want to let you know that you’ve been admitted — but we don’t stop there.
If you’ve received an offer of admission to your second choice — congratulations! And if your status says that your first choice is still pending an evaluation — this means that we are still evaluating your first choice application.
The best source of information on the status of your application is the Student Service Centre. Here you will see the status of each one of your choices – and the statuses may be different for each.
By receiving an offer to your second choice, this does not mean that we will stop evaluating your first choice. When we arrive at a decision about your first choice, you will see the status change. On the flip side, since you’ve noted that your first choice is your preferred choice — if we offer you admission to your first choice then this is where we stop. We will only evaluate your second choice if you request us to do so by contacting us. We always assume that your first choice is what you prefer and we will continue evaluating both until we have a decision on your first choice.
Through March and early April, we received grades for over 9,000 BC high school students through self-reporting so we continue to evaluate applications and render decisions. We continue to make decisions so keep checking the Student Service Centre for updates on your application.